C64.COM interview #36: Matt Gray (2014)

The most technical of matt-gray's interviews: how his player was organised, what made its vibrato "his", which games he did in which year and how long each took, and the Compunet-to-System 3 career path.

Key claims#

• Born May 1970 in Kent; ZX81 and Spectrum first, C64 in 1985 "once I'd heard the SID chip and, specifically at that time, Ghostbusters"; then rob-hubbard and martin-galway "and I was hooked". Compunet "was vital in enabling me to get my demos out there and heard" (Paul Docherty/Dokk, Cory Kin/Hex, Graham Hunter).
• Workflow: "a little Casio MT-45 keyboard … which I used to work out chords and melodies with very basic sounds", a C64 and a portable TV in his room.
• Heroes: Hubbard's One Man & His Droid and Phantom of the Asteroids ("quite a complex sound from just three monophonic sound channels"); Galway's Ocean loaders — "His Rambo loader is my favourite C64 tune of all time." Coolest thing invented on the C64: "soundmonitor and Rockmonitor, godsends at the time."
• Career by year. 1987: Mean Streak (Dalali) — "the game's programmers had to re-write the player in order for it to work with the game and they left out all the modulation and pitch end routines, so it sounded very different"; Yogi Bear; Quedex (Thalamus) — the loader had been written in Soundmonitor, "somehow, they managed to get it to play while the game loaded", the in-game tunes "needed to be written in such a way that if a sound effect played, it didn't destroy the music too much", about two weeks for all tunes and FX; driller (Incentive) — "They wanted something long and epic, not short and repetitive", four weeks including the Great Storm of October 1987; November 1987 the Bangkok Knights loader for system-3 within a week (Hubbard had done the in-game and was leaving for the US) → an exclusive contract; Fruit Machine Simulator, first for codemasters: "They were the ones who convinced me to write my own player. Back then, there was little chance of doing games music without that skill"; Hunter's Moon (Thalamus), discussing music routines with Martin Walker, who was writing his own; Pogo Stick Olympics. 1988: last-ninja-2 from mid-January to early April — "I did the Central Park tracks first, which was important in order to stamp some sort of 'sound' on the game"; "I was given a fairly free hand"; dominator with "a dance-track influence"; Tusker with a cricket sound modelled on Hubbard's Flash Gordon and "a tribal sound overall", four or five weeks. 1989: Vendetta (a cover of The The's Infected as the first track; "a lot of use of the filters"), his last for System 3 around March 1989 — "I think the Maniacs of Noise had rolled into town by then!" (maniacs-of-noise); Maze Mania (Hewson, two weeks); KGB Superspy — "trying to maximise any rhythm elements without using a whole channel to do it" (channel-interleaving); Motocross (from an unreleased Turbo Outrun); Treasure Island Dizzy ("a rhythm in 12ths with a heavy swing. I liked the arpeggio chords in it"), later on NES; BMX Simulator II. 1990: Deliverance: Stormlord II, "my last ever SID track".
• Timescales: low-budget games "a few days"; Driller four weeks; Last Ninja 2 "within 14–16 weeks".
• The player: "I don't think I invented anything specific, but I did write my player to adopt a sequencer approach. Rather than program every note played in sequence, it used a series of smaller sequences." (orderlist)
• The sound: "I think the way I processed my modulation routines gave it my 'sound' if you like. For example, my vibrato routines didn't use the correct algorithm, as say Rob's or Martin's did. Mine was just a simple up-and-down pitch change, depending on other factors such as delaying the vibrato and the vibrato speed and depth. But the higher the notes you played, the less vibrato you got, and the lower you went, the deeper it got. I was always adding-in modifiers and routines to produce better-sounding drums, but I always kept a bank of sounds that could be modified from project to project." (vibrato, instrument-design)
• Favourites of his own: Driller, the Central Park loader and in-game from Last Ninja 2; proudest of the whole LN2 soundtrack. By the end "I was starting to find a threshold with the SID that I couldn't push beyond … just slightly bored with three channels" as samplers became affordable.
• Anecdote: a "SID player available for licence" offered at an Earls Court show "turned out to be just a disassembled Rob Hubbard routine which they'd re-commented and labelled up"; his own routine "was clearly different".
• Influences beyond Hubbard/Galway: Kraftwerk, Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter, Ennio Morricone, Blondie, the Sex Pistols; the tunes he aspired to were 1985–87: Sanxion, Rambo, Commando, W.A.R., Phantom of the Asteroid, Green Beret, Knucklebusters.
• The 2014 Kickstarter: about 20 remade tracks plus an extended remake of the whole LN2 soundtrack, and "six brand new pure-SID tunes based on imagined fictional sequels" (s-matt-gray-dominator-source).

Notable quotes#

"Rather than program every note played in sequence, it used a series of smaller sequences."

"…the higher the notes you played, the less vibrato you got, and the lower you went, the deeper it got."

Relevance to the wiki#

Gray's own account of the matt-gray-player (sequences, modulation, vibrato that scales with pitch — which SIDin's frequency-domain description explains), dated production facts for driller, last-ninja-2 and dominator, and the Codemasters/System 3 context.

Pages touched#

matt-gray · matt-gray-player · driller · last-ninja-2 · dominator · system-3 · codemasters · hewson · soundmonitor · rob-hubbard · martin-galway · maniacs-of-noise · vibrato · orderlist · channel-interleaving · instrument-design · sid · sound-effects